MONTREAL - When was the last time you ate out or went to a bar on Prince-Arthur St.? Prince-Arthur St. E., that is, the cobbled stretch between St-Laurent Blvd. and Carré St-Louis. Think about it for a minute.

If you’re like most Montrealers, it has been a while. And if you take the time to look around the street, despite the prevailing icy wind, when you’re there next, you’ll immediately see why. It seems like one in three buildings on it are vacant, with forlorn-looking À Louer signs hanging in the windows that aren’t boarded over.

Once-grand façades of most of the restaurants that still are open have become shabby. Trash is piled in corners, walls are covered in graffiti and people on the street are all doing the aggressive head-down walk of those rushing through the cold to be elsewhere.

But it was not always like this.

Prince-Arthur St. has a rich history. It was named for Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, the third son of Queen Victoria and 10th Governor General of Canada. In the early 20th century, the street was the geographic centre of the Jewish garment worker’s labour movement; the building that is now Café Campus housed the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Montreal poet Émile Nelligan grew up just off Prince-Arthur; you can still find a bust of him where the street opens into Carré St-Louis. As the 20th century wore on, Portuguese immigrants replaced the Jewish ones in the neighbourhood, and by the late 1960s, Prince-Arthur had gone from being the home of unions to being the centre of Montreal’s counterculture movement.

Gentrification arrived in the area by the mid-1970s, and the eclectic shops that had catered to the hippy crowd began to be replaced by the large Greek restaurants that the area became popular for. The decision to turn the street into a pedestrian mall — as well as widening sidewalks on St-Denis St., Mont-Royal Ave. and Papineau St. — was made during mayor Jean Drapeau’s reign as an effort to strengthen Montreal’s commercial arteries. Future mayor Pierre Bourque, then head of city parks, oversaw the million-dollar project. It was completed as the weather cooled in the fall of 1981, but The Gazette reported that “special winter activities are expected to help give it year-round popularity.”

Through the 1980s, Prince-Arthur suffered from some infrastructure problems — really, what part of Montreal hasn’t? — but on the whole, did fairly well. The street did attract some of the tourists it was targeting, but its real economic base was the suburbanites who came downtown for the heaping portions, alfresco atmosphere, and BYOW policy — at the time not fully legal — of the street’s numerous Greek and other ethnic restaurants. This group did a good job of sustaining the street year-round and, on the whole, Prince-Arthur remained vibrant well into the 1990s.

So, what happened?

The answer is complex, but it starts with the increasing development of the suburbs. As restaurants like Casa Grecque, which started on Prince-Arthur, gradually began to open other locations, the suburbanites who had once flocked to the street suddenly didn’t have to go so far for ethnic cuisine.

“We used to be one of the top locations,” Casa Grecque’s manager Pavlo Joannides told me. “Now, it’s the bottom.”

In the words of another of the street’s restaurateurs, Tim Maheras, co-owner of Les Deux Gamins, a French bistro and one of the few vital restaurants on the street today, “those places essentially stole their own business.”

The suburban crowds who once filled Prince-Arthur St. now have options in their own neighbourhoods — options with attached parking lots. Additionally, as summertime terrasses began to open on other Montreal streets, the monopoly that Prince-Arthur’s restaurants once had on open-air dining vanished.

Next, in the early 2000s, property taxes shot up, and foodie and tourism culture began to shift in a way that created a destructive cycle for business on Prince-Arthur. The heaping plates of brochettes and rice offered by so many of the street’s restaurants went out of style.

“It used to be that every restaurant on the street had the same menu. … That just won’t work any more,” explained Raimondo Salvagio, co-owner of bar Vol de Nuit. “They’re not going to get the ’80s back.”

Tastes shifted faster than menus, causing further flight among locals. This gave the area the reputation of being a tourist trap, which — ironically — made it less appealing to tourists who, in the age of the online restaurant review, are increasingly looking for an “authentic” or “local” experience.

So Prince-Arthur St. has had some bad luck. But Professor Raphaël Fischler, the director of McGill’s School of Urban Planning, explains that it may only have been the good luck of appealing to suburbanites that made the year-round pedestrianization of Prince-Arthur work in the first place. The declining local interest in the street’s summertime charms can be attributed to shifts in taste and the failure of many restaurants to adapt to this changing demand, but “what does Prince-Arthur represent year round?” Fischler asked. “Why should I go there in the winter?” In response to his own question, the professor said he hasn’t visited the street in almost a decade.

On paper, Prince-Arthur St. is an ideal candidate for a pedestrian mall. It is located between two major thoroughfares, St-Laurent and St-Denis, has some lovely old-world architecture, backs onto one of the city’s nicest parks, and offers a direct route from St-Laurent to the Sherbrooke métro station. But in the winter, a lot of that goes out the window.

“It’s one of the coldest streets on the Plateau,” said urban planner Zev Moses, who lives in the area and directs the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal. “Winter turns the whole thing into a giant wind tunnel.”

The street’s winter weather doesn’t exactly encourage window-shopping, and Joannides of Casa Grecque emphasized that the lack of parking around the street hurts winter business: “People walking to the métro don’t usually stop.”

Montreal has had a great deal of success with seasonal street closings in the Gay Village and Quartier des spectacles; even with the “special winter activities” once cited in The Gazette nowhere to be found, one wonders why Prince-Arthur does not operate the same way.

“With our winter climate,” Fischler mused, “my take is that it’s a cautionary tale against full pedestrianization. Maybe if cars could come on the street in winter, there would be more patronage.”

This warning seems especially pertinent in light of Mayor Denis Coderre’s recent announcement that the city is considering year-round pedestrianization of parts of Ste-Catherine St.

So would allowing cars on Prince-Arthur St. in the winter be a boon to the street?

The merchants are of mixed opinion.

“Opening up the street would be a big mistake,” said Salvagio, whose bar is closer to the bustle of St-Laurent.

But Maheras, whose restaurant is on the other side of the street, disagreed: “This street is basically a ghost town during the winter. So why not open it up to traffic? At least then people can get dropped off in front of a restaurant.”

The previous borough government told Maheras that doing so would require the installation of curbs, a fairly major construction project, and was not viable.

Without cars, “it’s like the beach here,” Maheras grumbled. “I pay $18,000 a year in property taxes, but only get four or five months of real business.”

The management of Casa Grecque was cautious about the idea of opening the street to vehicles, but said “anything that increases parking is going to help us. We used to get big groups coming in. Now, half a reservation won’t show up because they can’t find a place to park.”

Alex Norris, city councillor for the Plateau, explained in an interview that from what he has heard no one “would welcome putting cars back on Prince-Arthur.”

The contrast between this statement and what Maheras said points to a possible failure to communicate, although perhaps an understandable one. Maheras told me that he has gone to past city governments, “but they just don’t listen to me,” and Joannides echoed the sentiment.

For his part, Norris encouraged the businesses on Prince-Arthur to band together and form a representative organization: “When it’s just individual merchants, it’s harder to get a sense of whether initiatives enjoy the wholehearted support of other merchants on the street.”

McGill’s Fischler made a similar suggestion. I mentioned this to Maheras, but he remained discouraged: “I’ve gone around and talked to everybody about having our own association. But it appears to me that our voice doesn’t matter. Even if we all said something, they’re not going to help us out.”

Salvagio was a little more positive: “I’ll get an association going. That’s the key, but the restaurants need to work together and the city needs to work with us.”

Despite its persistent troubles, there may yet be some hope for Prince-Arthur. Its east end, which opens onto the park, where Les Deux Gamins is located, is doing noticeably better than the part of the street closer to St-Laurent. Maheras reported that his restaurant has been growing every year since it opened, but that is mostly because it does well with American tourists who visit in the summer.

“The winters are extremely hard,” he told me. “A lot of us have thought about not even staying open.” Indeed, Casa Grecque is now closed on Mondays and does not open for lunch.

Valérie Girard, co-owner of Les Deux Gamins, and Maheras’s wife, said, “We were hopeful that our presence on the street five years ago would begin to attract a new type of client and maybe, dare we say, also inspire a better calibre of restaurants to follow. We are on the cusp and continue to ride it out.”

High taxes, the street’s bad reputation and the lack of business in the winter, however, don’t make it a very attractive place to invest.

“The street needs a facelift,” said Salvagio, gesturing at the empty shell that was a barbecue restaurant across from his bar.

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